Award-winning social marketing campaign reduces pressure on NHS Accident & Emergency departments
Author: CIM CSM
The Right Care, First Time campaign by Hitch Marketing won best Not for Profit Campaign at the fourth annual CIM Northern Awards 2017 earlier this month, where the best marketers and campaigns in the North were celebrated by the world’s largest professional marketing association. Judge Heike O’Leary from Lookers plc commented; “This is a worthy winner based on in-depth research, engaging creative implementation and compelling results, making a meaningful difference to the NHS on a limited budget.” In this article Hitch Marketing outline the campaign that netted the coveted award.
Holly Dixon, marketing strategist at Hitch Marketing describes the campaign.
Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCG) across the country faced a £140 million funding gap for Accident and Emergency (A&E) services within a decade. The NHS responded to this by commissioning a series of ‘Vanguard’ programmes, to deliver prototype campaigns and initiatives directed to tackle the gap.
These vanguard programmes addressed a range of issues causing inefficiency in the NHS. For two CCGs in the Midlands, this led to them approaching behaviour change agency Hitch Marketing, to address inappropriate attendances at A&E, by developing a social marketing campaign. This campaign was to educate audiences on all appropriate health service choices – including self-care, pharmacies, NHS 111, GPs, and minor injury units (MIU) – rather than making A&E their first port of call, and to drive this behaviour change.
The campaign followed the best practice planning process developed by the National Social Marketing Centre (NSMC) - which closely mirrors the Government’s OASIS framework - and after an inception meeting with representatives from the Mansfield and Ashfield and Newark and Sherwood CCGs, the campaign moved to scoping. Quantitative and qualitative research methods were used, analysing hospital admissions, interviewing service users, and surveys to ensure representation of hard-to-reach groups. This provided a baseline to measure behaviour change throughout the project. Through the research and segmentation process two priority target markets were identified who were using A&E inappropriately: young adults aged 19-29 and parents of infants aged 0-5. This drove the creation and delivery of a highly-targeted information campaign to educate and empower.
This development was firmly rooted in the scoping stage. After testing creative, channels were selected on the basis of their relevancy to the target segments, and their suitability to the content of the campaign.
This led to outdoor advertising in areas of high footfall of the target segments, bolstered by digital advertising across platforms of highest resonance, using pinpoint targeting to address these specific demographics and drive clicks to the campaign landing page for further information.
Insight drawn from the research suggested that radio would be particularly applicable for part of the target audience and so advertisements for this platform were developed and deployed at times most likely to be heard by the target audience.
The research phase identified issues with consistent communications across the various NHS services, and so print assets along with digital advertisements were delivered to the various stakeholders, these included waiting room posters and digital screen presentations which provided consistent communications on appropriate service access. An insight drawn from the research suggested that for those parents misusing the service communications channels addressing or involving children would be effective for providing dwell time and emotional association tied to the campaign. This led to the development of colouring books and a pairs matching game educating children and parents in clinical settings.
Using the baseline findings and a repeat of this survey, alongside a public survey, the evaluation measured changes in awareness and behaviour, and showed the campaign to be successful in reducing inappropriate attendances to Accident & Emergency by 12% within the target audiences.
Luke Barrett, Communications and Engagement Lead for Mansfield & Ashfield Clinical Commissioning Group said, “Following a comprehensive research phase…[Hitch Marketing] delivered a targeted, fully integrated campaign across digital and social media, radio, outdoor, print, PR and stakeholder relations, using innovation and a mix of owned, earned and paid for media. This resulted in evidence of message awareness and early signs of behaviour change.”